Republicans fight for employers’ right to make people work more for less pay

The right to work for a fair wage was considered such an important civil rights issue during the 1960s that one of the 10 demands of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a: “A national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living”. The amount they proposed was $2, which would be $15 in today’s money. Our federal minimum wage is currently only $7.25.

But “right-to-work” laws – that half of all states in America fall under – do diddly squat to fix a minimum wage law that provides workers with less than a living wage. The misleadingly named law has nothing to do with any increased access to employment: it really only gives people the “right” to work in increasingly non-unionized, low-wage, split-shift jobs that may require hours of uncompensated time .

Proponents of right to-work frame their position as freedom for “America’s workers from the abuses of unionism” – an abuse only forced upon about 11 % of workers in the United States. And while the list of things workers don’t like about their job seems to grow daily, the path to recourse for workers only grows smaller.

Right-to-work has come to mean laboring under any conditions which benefit employers – but some workers are fighting back.

One place of hope is in the collegiate workplace. At New York University, where I am a doctoral student worker, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee and the UAW won an historic contract last week, making NYU once again the only private university with a unionized graduate student workforce in the United States.

When Bayard Rustin read the March on Washington’s demand for $2 an hour, he framed fair compensation as a moral imperative as important as the vote and an end to segregation. Martin Luther King and 250,000 Americans gathered near the Lincoln Memorial agreed. That call, which is a civil rights issue at heart, is still unanswered, as the Fight for $15 movement is pressing for the same amount in today’s terms. It is no less urgent today.